• Uncategorized

    Ideas for Rich Documents

    Frode and I have spent a long time discussing rich text documents. Or augmented or enhanced. Whatever you want to call them. The basic idea is that structured supporting information should be included in the document. Generally this should be little or no work for the author as they will already have the structured information so it’s just about tools to attach it in creation and exploit it in consumption. The proof of concept demo Frode has recently shown just writes the BibTeX version of the bibliography at the end of the document (in a small font). Discovery is as simple as looking for a line starting with a “@”…

  • API,  Liquid Space

    Graph API

    This is a first explanation of the Graph API that I’ve added to this blog to allow it to be explored within our Liquid Space interface. To try it out, go to http://liquidspace.global/ and use the [G] icon in the tools menu, and enter this “endpoint” https://jrnl.global/wp-json/graph-api/v1/query This lets you explore this blog as a graph. Currently it’s really inefficient in several ways, but the ways to optimise it are obvious, but not worth worrying about until after our Demo in December. It also has a feature that lets you request a list of types from the blog, and retrieve nodes by type. I think I want to get rid…

  • High Resolution Addressability,  Implicit Linking,  jrnl,  Liquid Space,  ViewSpecs

    This week’s Liquid Space updates

    I’ve made a few big changes to the back end of “Liquid Space” so that the code is more logical and modular and less like something I wrote as a stream of consciousness ramble at 3am. I’m slowly renaming “node” to “card” as I think the idea of index cards is a good metaphor for discrete fragments of web content. Also it’s less scary to people who don’t think in graphs  – 99.99% of our potential users! Also, I’ve done is tidied up the code which handles a pasted URL. It now makes a nice little icon with the image of the thing. It’s a bit *too* little, so I’m…

  • Functionalities/Features,  Liquid Space

    Refactor of Liquid Space code.

    I took the code for liquid space apart to try to find what shape it needed to be in. It’s looking much cleaner under the good now. You can play with it now at http://liquidspace.global/ Key features Cards (nodes to the graph nerds in the audience) Cards have Actions – things you can do with the card such as destroying it or setting an alternate View. Cards have views, which alter the content, and may alter how the card is displayed. All views of a card will work with the same metadata inside the card. Move around the display using click and drag and mousewheel to zoom. Like an online…

  • Annotation,  Authoring,  Citations,  Demo @ 50,  High Resolution Addressability,  Meetings

    Webleau progress (Liquid Space)

    Hi, this is a quick update on Webleau (Web Tableau) part of my suite of ideas for how I’d like information systems to work. A guiding principle for me is that people should be able to get a feel for what’s going on and it should be “easy to do the right thing”, rather than a chore. Try the current work in progress here: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~totl/webleau/ The webleau idea is based on an older tool I made, wiki explorer, which was a tool for exploring wikipedia, linked data and other graphs of information. It used <canvas> and didn’t save well, nor did I really think about how to load/save things. None…